“I’m just doing my job,” she said to me. In frustration, I responded. “Then let me talk to someone who will do more than just her job.” Perhaps I was cruel, but it was clear that the customer service operator on the phone was not prepared...

The following is an excerpt from a speech I gave at the ROHS National Honor Society induction ceremony. A hunter has been wandering through the woods, lost, thirsty, and desperate. Finally, we wanders into a small camp. “Thank goodness!” he cries,...

“I haven’t received any call back from you.” I didn’t know whose voice it was on my cell phone. All I knew was that she was an older woman staying in Florida and that she had called me at some point while I was teaching a Haruki Murakami novel...

Maybe I’m in the mood to vent—but why should I? It’s not like our world is full of the ridiculous, packed with the absurd, stuffed with the ludicrous. It’s not like I can’t make sense of the planet. As I tell me Lit. of the Western World students, existentialists...

In his book, An Assault on Reason, Al Gore draws a parallel between the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial. The detainees, he writes, have not been told the crimes with which they have been charged, they are “served” by secret...